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Cooper and Seawright receive Behrman Award

Posted May 11, 2004; 03:34 p.m.

by rstevens

John Cooper, Stuart Professor of Philosophy, and James Seawright, professor of the Council of the Humanities and visual arts, have been honored with Princeton's Behrman Award for distinguished achievement in the humanities.

Cooper, a faculty member since 1981, teaches and conducts research on ancient Greek philosophy. He is the author of "Reason and Human Good in Aristotle" (Harvard University Press, 1975), which won the Franklin Matchette Prize from the American Philosophical Association; and "Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Ethical Theory and Moral Psychology" (1999) and "Knowledge, Nature and the Good: Essays on Ancient Philosophy" (to be published this year), both Princeton University Press books. His widely acclaimed edition of the "Complete Works" of Plato in new modern translations appeared from Hackett Publishing in 1997.

Cooper earned bachelor's and doctoral degrees from Harvard and attended Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar. He chaired the philosophy department from 1984 to 1992 and was named a Stuart professor in 1998. In 2003, he received a Graduate Mentoring Award from the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning and Graduate School for his outstanding work with graduate students.

Seawright was acting director and then director of the Program in Visual Arts from 1975 to 2001. When he came to Princeton to teach sculpture in 1969, the visual arts faculty consisted of two other people, a potter and a painter. During his tenure, the number grew to 22 primarily part-time faculty members representing the spectrum of views and ideologies within the art world.

Recognized as one of the foremost technological artists since the late 1960s, Seawright has produced works that are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and the Guggenheim Museum of New York, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, the New Jersey State Museum at Trenton and other museums throughout the world. A graduate of the University of Mississippi, Seawright received a lifetime achievement award in 2003 for his significant contributions to sculpture from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.

Bestowed annually, the Behrman Award was established in 1975 by a gift from the late Howard Behrman, a physician and book collector.